Dreams came flooding back like a tide, and when Qin Zhongquan regained consciousness, a cycle had already passed.
He opened his eyes and saw the first officer strapped to his chair, unconscious. Debris drifted across the empty bridge. Frost formed on a water bottle, indicating the ambient temperature, but there was no chill at all. The flexible screen before him displayed the ship's exterior. Red alarms flashed continuously, but no beeps were heard. The previously spotted UFO maintained its original formation, hovering a hundred kilometers directly in front of the ship. It should have locked onto them by now, but it hadn't made any further movement. Everything felt utterly distorted, like a hallucination induced by drug intoxication.
Qin Zhongquan tried to recall what had happened, but his memory was obscured by a thick haze. He couldn't recall anything from the past few days, and he'd almost forgotten his identity. His first reaction was that there was a traitor among the crew, and his anger took over. He suddenly rose from the commander's chair with such force that he lifted himself off the floor and floated into the air. The unaccelerated ship had no simulated gravity, so he had no leverage until he hit the ceiling. If the traitor had attacked at that moment, he wouldn't have had a chance to strike back.
Fortunately, he was overthinking it. The subordinates working here were all immersed in their own world, and the so-called traitor did not exist, at least not inside the bridge.
After a few minutes, he heard someone whispering.
[Child, come here...] The voice was ethereal and gentle, like the call of a mother animal, which made him look around but could not find the source of the voice.
[Child, come to me.] The voice repeated again.
[Child, come back to me!] The voice repeated again.
Then, all the illusions vanished, and Qin Zhongquan found himself sitting in a chair, his flight control panel already set to a previously unseen target point. It was located beyond the borders of human civilization, near a dwarf planet within the Oort Cloud, approximately one light-year from the Sun.
It is impossible for a person to complete such a complex operation when he is unconscious, so the target point is likely to have been stored in the shipboard computer from the beginning. Perhaps he accidentally touched the button in his sleep and retrieved the old data, but this still cannot explain the reason for the illusion.
Maybe he was really tired.
As the leader of a mercenary group, he considered this a disgrace, so without anyone noticing, he moved the target point to the Recycle Bin and completely deleted it. However, for some unknown reason, he had marked the target point's coordinates in his secret memo. The celestial bodies in the Oort Cloud have very long orbital periods, so such fixed coordinates wouldn't need to be updated in the short term.
After completing all the little tricks, Qin Zhongquan coughed and woke his subordinates: "Alright, my brothers! It's time to set off. By the way, who wants to be the navigator of the End?"
"The End? Why not the Terror?" someone stood up and asked.
"Yeah, even the Extreme sounds better than this!"
"Protest, there must be something shady going on here!"
"Protests are useless!" the first mate muffled the clamor. "Long legs! Isn't this the navigator position you've always wanted?"
"Navigator—now?" The guy nicknamed Long Legs asked in disbelief.
"Navigator! Go to your seat." Qin Zhongquan issued the first order of the Terminus without waiting for him to recover. "Target, head for Enceladus!"
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